Denver – As it was for a lot of ‘boomers,’ 1967 was a watershed year in the life of Meredith Vaughn. That year thousands of flower children descended upon San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury for what came to be known as the Summer of Love. Two books topped everybody’s reading list back then. One was Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse, the other, Autobiography of a Yogi, by Yogananda.
‘One of my professors turned me on to Hesse,’ says Vaughn, who studied Romance Languages at CU/ Boulder. ‘Siddhartha was Hesse’s version of the Buddha’s life. Born of wealth, he experimented ‘til he found his way. The book touched me deeply.’ As for Autobiography of a Yogi: ‘It freed me from the cultural prison I’d been confined to in American society,’ Vaughn says. ‘I was never the same after that. Christianity just didn’t do it for me. I saw there were other options.’
She’s been exploring and teaching the ‘other options’ – among them Hatha Yoga, and Transcendental Meditation – ever since. (Note: It was at Vaughn’s instigation that Kaiser-Permanente began offering classes in yoga and qi gong to its Denver clients in 1992.)
In February of 2006 one of Vaughn’s yoga students showed her an article about the Laughter Yoga movement in India. Laughter yoga, the article said, was the brain child of a Mumbai physician named Madan Kataria, who reviewed studies on the health benefits of laughter and concluded that not only is a good chuckle a great stress buster, it also strengthens the immune system, retards ageing, stimulates blood circulation, improves muscle tone, increases endorphin levels, helps control high blood pressure, improves sleep, reduces depression, alleviates bronchitis and asthma, and promotes world peace. Seriously.
Kataria invited a group of friends to meet in a Mumbai park, where he encouraged them to tell jokes and tickle each other’s funny bones. ‘But the jokes got old,’ explains Meredith’s architect husband, David Vaughn, who is himself a laughter practitioner. ‘They were sexist and deprecating, and the women stopped coming.’
Kataria went back to his research and found that even fake laughter will bring about the same physiological benefits since, on a cellular level, the body doesn’t know the difference. He invented exercises that engage the laughter muscles, threw in some yogic breathing, and before long laughter yoga clubs were sprouting up all over the planet. Today there are an estimated 5000 such groups in 40 countries, operating under the slogan ‘World Peace through laughter, one laugh at a time.’
When she learned that Dr. Kataria would be offering a teacher-training seminar in Pasadena, Meredith decided to attend. ‘I knew immediately that this was what I wanted to do,’ she says. ‘It clicked with me. Old age was looking rather daunting. I decided I wanted to go out laughing.’
‘I’m going with you,’ said husband David, who has assisted his wife in her yoga and qi gong classes over the nearly forty years of their marriage. ‘At first I was skeptical,’ he admits. ‘I wasn’t much of a laugher. I’m a serious architect, and I was laughter challenged. But gradually we were able to ad lib, roll with it and have some fun, and I found myself genuinely laughing.’
After seven days of intensive training, the couple came home and started the Denver Laughter Club, which meets every Monday at noon at the Cheeseman Park Pavilion in summer, and at 1st Unitarian Church, 14th and Lafayette (‘Laffy-ette’) after Labor Day.
‘Laughter yoga adjusts your set point for happiness upwards,’ David says. ‘When you feel down, initiate the ‘ho ho - ha ha ha’ exercise.* It opens up the body, pumps oxygen into your system, and gets you out of your downward spiral of depression.’
‘The communities we’ve formed from the laughter yoga groups are a meaningful connection for us as we age,’ Meredith says. ‘I call my class the ‘Sane Asylum.’ Laughter erases all rational thought and opens your heart. I’ve travelled all over the world doing trainings and studying yoga, and what it really comes down to is opening your heart and learning to love.’
*The Ho-Ho-Ha-Ha-Ha Exercise: Chant ‘ho, ho – ha, ha, ha’ while clapping in rhythm to the words. This repeated movement activates acupressure points in the hands, and becomes a positive trigger for laughter.
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